Early on in writing this book, I was confronted with the way I had begun presenting the stories of people from my life. I wrestle with presenting my own stories because by doing so I risk introducing the comparison of this and that, meaning my stories compete for the best narrative. They do that anyway though… so I’ve tried to keep myself out of it. I think this is why many writers take great effort to abstract themselves out of the storyline; it’s not about me, after all. But when you create up you also create down. Rules create rule-breakers, and interpolations of my story must also be part of a story that includes others.
So then I walked myself right into this, now didn’t I? And as we so often do, I began framing things from a perspective that allowed much of my wrongdoing to leave the story’s canon, what was unresolved in me for what I thought I knew about them. Though I was presenting stories of my account, they were examples of other people. My choice to so often leave my place out of the writing for fear of self-aggrandizement did the opposite of what I intended: by keeping myself to myself in a story about others, the decision removed the scalable ways in which I myself fall into the same patterns, bleeding through my words which suggested to the people near me: “I would never do that.”
Therefore by negating the scalable patterns that I myself fall into, I turn away from the evil that rests inside of me, denying it as it grows stronger in the shadows. The Hitler in myself as it were. I am not a mere observer. I am a character in the story. We all are. And we all want to be the hero, don’t we? Rocky Balboa, himself, right? A lot of us think we are, too. And it’s a good story to tell, isn’t it? The underdog that triumphs despite the odds? A story as old as time, better and better as it becomes more refined each time that it is told…
What about Uncle Paulie, Rocky’s abusive brother-in-law? The guy who disappoints underperforms and is a slave to the system that rejects him. A a tired and angry drunkard who lived in the shadows his whole life. At least Paulie showed his holes. He did not turn away from where we all find ourselves in some version of, in moments or in seasons, or in the endings of our lives. Despair, hopelessness, and the pain of being misunderstood. Paulie just never got out from under his shadows. And he had a bad poker face. That’s a much tougher story to tell.
That story includes the realization that all of my actions, inactions, and omissions all have ripple effects on the other characters in my story, even the ones I don’t meet. These omissions go largely unnoticed even to the trained eye if you don’t know me.
And most of you don’t know me. I’ve told you a few signature details but it is hardly encompassing of my day-to-day life. I’ve never canceled plans on you. I’ve never said I would do something but never followed through. I’ve never made promises to you that I couldn’t keep. I’ve never lied to you to achieve my own ends. I don’t forget things around your house or at your work. Someone has, but not me. I produce entertaining content that you read or watch and then make your own determinations on and if I’m doin’ a good job you’re hooked and I therefore can do no wrong.
In the real world, the people in our lives know better. Because they do know you. And the real ones, they’ll tell ya. Real friends tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. They do it from a place of love, I believe. Not to one-up the other person, rather because they can see a clumsier or more emotionally blinded version of themselves in the person they have before them. It is done from a place of stewardship. Blind and unwavering validation on the other hand is the allure of dictators and authoritarians. Those who refuse at all costs to look at themselves will surround themselves with those who would comply.
We should all have some of those friends that steal our ignorance from us. Our ability to say we didn’t know better. It’s from a place of compassion for events that haven’t transpired yet. Just a little nudge. And Kevin was a real one. He could always see past my bullshit. When I was building a life whose pursuit was to distract myself from the ability to lay my head down at night and say I am being true to myself, Kevin could see past my big words and false bravado, all the status symbols I had amassed. He could sit down with me over a beer or a coffee and after I put on the best act, words and catchphrases plucked from a thesaurus and beta tested on coworkers and friends, he would sit across the table with a smile on his face and remind me “That’s all bullshit…” and as if George Carlin himself was across the way I heard him echo his tagline “And it’s bad for ya.”
And early on in our relationship, I wanted to be like Kevin. It’s not that I idolized him, rather I envied his agency. He was a vagabond who had traveled the world, witty and charismatic. He went to Gana and worked with physicians and nurses to keep people alive during outbreaks of Dengay fever and Ebola, returning to give dozens of lectures on medical care in impoverished countries.
It seemed as though he always had the right thing to say, always funny, on point, and at times grounded in uncomfortable truths (and that is the trick to levity ins’t it? The balance of knowing the audience and how far you can push them). EVERYONE had a Kevin story, each one more grandiose than the next. Most of them would conclude and provide commentary that Kevin cared very little about anyone but himself. Some were joking. Some not. Had anyone asked him what he cared about or was it the snapshot in time they had collected from him to then share and build stories around?
When I was with Kevin, I saw patience that others around us assumed he was not capable of. Kevin was engaged. He He cared about my thoughts and opinions and more than anything else, he shared with me how life could unravel and put together a man in a way that only successive trips around the sun could sometimes flesh apart, for time was needed for us to become more aware of our environments, of ourselves, and of what was in front of us all along.
Those stories about Kevin were funny, and some of them were probably true. But they lacked the nuance of the life that animated those stories. They were the masks people had chosen to see Kevin for and not the human behind whom those stories were about.
Kevin was real. If you asked, he would tell you and he would hold little back. Those stories were his to tell and unlike so many curated and polishes ones, what made his so lively was that they included him and every part of his part in the story. Even the ones we loved to hate. Why? Because the laughing was our own masks coming off Kevin gave us all permission to laugh at ourselves vicariously through his accounts. He showed the parts we so often try to hide in the images we present to others.
We all have to go to sleep with ourselves at night… in our heads and alone in our thoughts. Just like when we die. Those times in life when it all sets in,… right before it ends. And hearing #nobadvibes success stories gets old man. Come on now, doesn’t it? Don’t you get tired of hearing how great everybody is doing? Or how brave they were when they went out into the big and scary world?
We’re all spinning on this bigass rock hurdling through space at about a million miles an hour. It’s okay to feel a little insecure, folks. But can we quit bullshitting ourselves and one another about how together we have it long enough to be human with one another? That’s how Kevin told a story man, and as I type this I recognize that I am merely trying carry his bags and tell stories that show more to me than some ideals or dogma we’re told to aspire to. I can’t live up to those expectations. Even the dear leader poops, and the pope picks his nose. He rubs the boogers on that glass thing that keeps him from gettin MERKED.
Through those examples I therefore don’t shy away from the challenges that I am facing. I don’t say it for someone to feel pity on me or to shine a light on Chad. Quite the contrary. I’m almost done with my degree. In a short amount of time, I will be able to charge people money and make a living from discussions like these. The people that I sit next to in the welfare office… they don’t have that out.. that timeline.
My colleague from University and I were having a discussion on the way home about choices, life paths… the big ones. All of the things in this life that can weigh us down. Jobs… the ones we often don’t like, the sacrifices we make, and the people in our lives that matter most to us. And underpinning each of those decisions and directions in the path was “How you gonna pay for it?” And as was looking at him, I could feel my life in reverse all that once weighed me down and consumed my thought processes. And I think when he looked at me, he saw the future of all the things that could go wrong for him and its possible consequences. The 10,000 things directions of the mind.
And that was hard to see when I worked for the fire department. I had my own emergencies. My own trappings. Sound familiar? Maybe things seem so consequential now… If my car breaks down, I don’t have money to pay for it. But when I had money to pay for it, it was just as consequential. That money didn’t come out of thin air. It felt just as existential as it does now. I was in the thick of it then just as I am now.
What’s different this time is that I am more present to my life as it is unfolding than I was then. I am more present to the people around me. Said a better way perhaps, I am more observant. I think I was more vigilant back then. Everything felt so existential. It was always existential. Now things move so much slower. You could call that boring, I suppose. I always find things to do when I get bored. I think of it as the space between the notes. Those quiet spaces where I can contemplate the happenings of this life and of my day. I was moving so fast back then that those spaces to observe my life were so few and far between.
The two seem to exist at once, the chaos and the quiet spaces. How aware we are is related to how in-sync we are to the never-ending spin of things, I think. It can sound like harmony in motion or static. Tune your radio dial a little bit. Now your comin’ on strong.
It was all existential. All the parts. Life is existential.